I want to capitalise on the current “X-odus” momentum, and convince my university (or at least my department, which is quite big) to have its own Mastodon server.
My rationale is that if I can convince my uni/dept that they will have better reach, control and experience with Mastodon, it will help populate the Fediverse and bring more academics on this platform to disseminate their research.
The reason I am asking the self-hosting community for help is because I know nothing about hosting my own Mastodon server, but should I manage to have a talk with my IT head or the dept head and convince them to come to the Fediverse, I might need to spin up a server for them.
- How easy is it to get Mastodon up and going?
- How costly a hardware do I need to ask for?
- How expensive is it to run the server annually?
- Any other points or aspects I need to keep in mind?
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“How do I convince my tech department to take on additional tech debt”
You can always ask the student body. If they’re doing a good job, they’re networked and know people and procedures. Sometimes the IT helpdesk people are knowledgeable and know who makes those kinds of decisions.
And I think server hosting and paying for that might work differently than in normal life. A university has quite some IT infrastructure. Maybe they have a free VPS to spare for things like that. Maybe it has to be super secure, intergrated into the single sign-on… It’s more a political decision. Could be anywhere from free, to you need to pay half a person’s salary to moderate and maintain the instance to their (high) standards.
“that’s the great part – you don’t!”
But Honestly, it’d be pretty damn cool. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find they don’t even run their own mail server though.
365 and G Suite educational licenses are significantly cheaper than running Exchange. Almost everywhere switched over years ago.
Unless they have an active IT department that is already hosting various websites for them, it is probably better to show them some hosted offer like this: https://masto.host/
As for your questions:
- Medium difficulty as far as self-hosting goes. Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails app.
- Really depends on the number of users etc.
- See no. 2. a few hundred $ or so.
- As others have mentioned, let them make an account on an existing server first, it can be migrated to your own server later.
Honorable goal. But it won’t work. From a business’s perspective, hosting such a server adds inherent risk. They won’t do it. You may be able to convince them to use the fediverse through threads or bluesky, but they won’t host their own instance, even if the CTO/CIO/CISO agrees with your love for the verse. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try. I’m saying you should provide alternatives to twitter and to self-hosted mastodon; alternatives that don’t require self hosting anything.
use the fediverse through threads or bluesky
Bluesky is not part of the fediverse and threads is mostly technically capable to be part of it - it is however blocked from the most other instances.
Bluesky is supposed to decentralized, though it doesn’t seem to be. Threads being blocked doesn’t change the fact that it is technically part of the verse, although a red herring. Maybe both poor examples, but they’re alternatives to the verse, which was my point. Maybe adding a public mastodon instance as an alternative would have been a better example, but the main point stands: a uni isn’t likely going to host their own instance, due to the inherent risk associated with it.
Another scenario would be all universities cooperate in one instance, like Surf does for all Dutch universities and colleges for vocational training.
Why not start with an account? You do not need to run a server to be int the fediverse. It’s enough for now if they’ve got a or multiple accounts and actively use it. Share the latest papers via that account. Provide news. Link to articles etc. That’s good enough for the beginning.
They absolutely won’t have better reach. Mastodon is significantly smaller than both Twitter and Bluesky.
Might look into Gotosocial considering it’s more lightweight.
Other than that I wonder whether it’s better for the uni/department to register on another instance, similar to how fosstodon is home for many FOSS projects. An inter-unis, academic-focused Fediverse server might be a good club project, and could allow more donation sources to sustain too (although this is pretty above-scope from what you’re asking).
It’s not really any different than hosting any other service.
